A Captive Lover Turns to Violence / Novel of a woman kept since childhood who tries to murder her captor

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, July 27, 1997

By
Benjamin Alire Saenz HarperCollins
; 341 pages; $24
Part crime thriller, part gothic melodrama, "The House of Forgetting" by Benjamin Alire Saenz is an entertaining and at times compelling novel, though its hybrid structure isn't entirely successful.

Plotting, for example, is much stronger than character development. People are forever "grinning" or "sneering" at each other and talking in the self-conscious, slightly embarrassed style of actors trapped in B-movie dialogues.

But Gloria Santos, who is both victim and heroine, is a very appealing and satisfying complex creation. At once fragile and stubborn, she's the central figure in a bizarre story of obsession and twisted love.

When the police break into Professor Thomas Blacker's locked house, they find him on the floor, unconscious and bleeding. A beautiful young woman sits, utterly still and unresponsive, at an elegantly laid dinner table. She has just stabbed the professor with a carving knife.

Blacker's colleagues at the University of Chicago, where he is a respected classics scholar, attest to his spotless personal reputation. A longtime widower, he has never been the subject of gossip. His students revere him; his books, which defend the moral value of a traditional liberal arts curriculum, have made him a famous and sought- after lecturer.

Lieutenant Murphy can't get anything out of the would-be murderer. He has the eerie impression that her stillness is less a refusal to answer his questions than a curious absence, as if she has erased herself from the world. What is even more mystifying is that no one knows her, or has ever seen her. She's not a student, a mistress or a prostitute; officially, she doesn't exist.

When Jenny Richard, the best public defender in Chicago, first sees her mysterious client, she is struck by the woman's composure, "as if she was wrapped in an innocence that seemed at once natural and incongruent, eyes soft, giving -- and yet impenetrable." Through patience and kindness, she wins the woman's trust and learns the terrible story we readers already know.

We've met Gloria and Blacker in the opening chapter, strolling in his Hyde Park garden, as they pick a bouquet for that fateful dinner. There is something stilted and unnatural in their conversation, and in the wariness of her thoughts, and we soon learn the reason. Gloria, whom Blacker calls Claudia, has not seen anything or anyone outside that garden in 23 years.

He kidnapped her at age 7 from an El Paso street, seeing in her the promise of the perfect woman he has trained her to become. She's his student, his child, his lover, his servant, his doll, his finest work. By turns loving and cruel, he has, he thinks, erased her childhood memories and remade her to reflect, even in her most intimate thoughts and desires, only what he has impressed there.

But enough of Gloria has survived in Claudia to make one desperate lunge at freedom with that carving knife. The police lieutenant and the lawyer -- he the one honest cop in a corrupt department; she the passionate defender of justice -- make Gloria/Claudia their cause, although they're frequently baffled by her ambivalence.

Blacker, meanwhile, recovering in the hospital, is arrogantly uncomprehending of her "ingratitude" and wants her back. When it looks as if Murphy and Richard have enough evidence to bring him, rather than his attacker, to trial, he calls on his erstwhile disciple, Herald Burns, one of the most successful and unscrupulous defense lawyers in Chicago.

Routine skulduggery ensues. Evidence disappears, threats are made, apartments are ransacked. The unconvincing subplot has Murphy and Richard exchanging hostile/playful banter like minor-league Hepburn-and-Tracy players. Saenz has no ear for dialogue. He's got no feel for Chicago, either. While the cop and the public defender negotiate their love-hate alliance in one kind of B-movie plot, Thomas Blacker is the outsized demonic protagonist of another, based on the mad-scientist scenario.

He's the weakest character in the novel because his villainy is so pure, so unmitigated, so boringly egotistical. Besides which, he has Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings. He talks gently and urbanely to Claudia at dinner, then comes to visit her at night with "the look of a hungry god who had found just the thing that would appease him."

What makes "The House of Forgetting" worth reading, besides the power games for control of Gloria, is Saenz's deft shifting of point of view from chapter to chapter, and his smooth alternations from Gloria's past to her present. Bringing his talents as a poet (he has published two collections) to the structure of this novel, he convincingly renders the inner voices of desire, regret and emotional turmoil.

Gloria's memories, for example, make a poignant counterpoint to Blacker's self-serving and madly logical journal entries over the years of captivity. And Gloria herself, the waif who is also a queen, is a fine dramatic figure. As she struggles for her mind and soul, she breathes real life into a book that is often in danger of falling apart into warring cliches.